Bao Shan Lu - Second Hand Markets

BaoShaoLu in northern shanghai is an area entirely composed of second markets. You can quite possibly buy everything that you ever wanted there. The outside markets concentrate on industrial goods such as chainsaws, vices, washing machines, linishers, electrical wire. Inside they concentrate on electrical goods such as computers, car stereos, hifi's, mobile phones etc and other household appliances. I'm not sure how much is genuinely second hand and how much is just stolen - i'm guessing most of the bikes are "hot" though - but it was really intersting to go round and take a look, I don't think any where else other than China would have such a market where things scavanged from the road side and dumps are sold as valued commoditites. Everything has a price in China and nothing goes to waste. Next time I need a pair of heavy duty bolt croppers I know where to go!

YuYingTang 育音堂

The bar I spend most of my time in, in Shanghai, is definitely YuYingTang. A live music venue, it hosts a different band most nights of the week and has a good mix of chinese and western music. Some of the Chinese bands I've seen in YuYingTang include Happy Avenue (one of the most famous chinese rock bands with the most famous rock star in china, Wu Hongfei, as their lead singer), Teddywish (Blink 182-esque pop/punk/emo but actually quite good), Reflector (Beijing punk rock), IDH (from inner mongolia - a 2 piece with extremely wierd singer) and the most accomplished band out of the lot The Honeys (signed to Sony music and described as the Chinese REM - they have supported Coldplay). I've also seen western bands such as Have Heart, Turdus Musicas and a few others including a chinese/western band - The Rogue Transmission.

The best things about YuYingTang are that it only usually costs 30/40RMB to see a band in YuYingTang so you don't mind going along and giving it a try - a big difference to england where gig tickets are usually around £10 even for smaller bands. Beer is only 20RMB (£1.70) for a small 300ml glass going up to 70RMB (£6) for a 1.5litre Jug - the last time I went there i ordered one and they asked "how many glasses" - I replied none and just drank straight from the jug. I think they were a bit surprised. The best thing about it is that it is set in a park so that between bands you can go outside get some fresh air, chill out and enjoy the evening. Really does set it apart from other places of it type in Shanghai. The worst things are the air con (none), the slippery floor - not good for dancing - and perhaps the fact that it is really small (but this is also perhaps one of the best things about it too).

Other decent music venues in Shanghai include LiveBar - a little too far out of town though - The DreamFactorys -massive new venue - and LoGO - really decent small venue.

BabyFace

Now that most of us out here have got jobs secured back home (just one or two others waiting for the call - fingers crossed) I think most of us have decided to un-wind a little for the last few months and try and have a good time before the *serious* work starts in September. This doesn't mean we are working any less hard, but might mean that we are just a little more tired when we are working.




BabyFace is China's most succesful Clubbing Chain. We visited one in Beijing when we were there and this one in shanghai is almost identical in every aspect - music, decor, clientele - but it is still fun. It is open everynight of the week and whilst the weekends are the most popular nights (for obvious reasons) it seems to be consistently busy throughout the week. The music it plays is the usual mix of chinese pop, R&B, Hip Hop and then mega dance tunes. They also get world famous DJ's to play there every now and again - DJ Tiesto, Judge Jules, Armand Van Bueran et al. Whilst this isn't exactly my cup of tea, i can dance to it every now and again if I've had enough to drink.



The best things about babyface though are that it is in the same complex as a McDonalds so ideal for relieving those 4am hunger pangs, there are millions of girls there, and it is only 2 minutes walk back to my house - so no need for a taxi afterwards. The worst thing is that, like most chinese clubs, they have a minimum spend policy if you want to sit at a table - that basically requires you buy a whole bottle of spirit with mixers (a long way away from Mazzo club in Shijiazhuang where they used to let us drink for free) and on a friday and saturday night it is like a meat market with far,far too many foreigners.

Other clubs we've been to in Shanghai are Muse, Muse 2, Shelter, Richy and DKD (drink as much as you like for 100Y every night). So there are plenty more for us to check out in our remaining couple of months here. I can feel the headaches just thinking about it now.

NEW Oven - 窑

My apartment comes "fully furnished", however one glaring thing it was lacking from the kitchen was an oven. I've promised that i'd cook for the people from the office but I really wasn't sure how I'd go about doing this with only 4 hobs and a microwave so I eventually crumbled and purchased myself a mini oven. It is actually a pretty amazing bit of kit -cost £20 - is about the size of an average microwave and comes with the attachments to turn it into a dedicated chicken rotisserie! As it is electric it also heats up in no time whatsoever - i learnt this as I left the complimentary oven glove that they supplied (a lovely lemon yellow in colour) on top of the oven for about 2 minutes as it heated up and soon smelt the burning!

Any how, see below for the first attempt at cooking with the oven. Chicken breast stuffed with mozarella cheese and wrapped in proscuito ham, served with pasta, asparagus, carrots and broccoli. The chicken was dirt cheap - 90p for two breasts and the vegetables were again near free but the western type foods i.e. pasta, mozarella and proscuito were hideously expensive but it was nice to be able to cook at home and enjoy a home made meal. Only bad news is that I now had 12 hungry colleagues waiting to be fed.

notice that my "fully furnished" apartment comes complete with plastic fork

Anji - Sea of Bamboo

A few weekends a go the group of us hired a minibus and headed to Anji for the weekend. Anji is in Zhejaing province and is about 5 hours drive from Shanghai. Anji is famous for its 60,000 hectares of bamboo groves and it produces 12 million commercial bamboo poles annually, making it China's biggest producer of Bamboo. Because of this everything in Anji is bamboo, it is literally everywhere. Bamboo hats, bamboo boats, bamboo houses, bamboo models, bamboo chairs they even produce bamboo beers and of course they eat bamboo for dinner as well!

The first day of our trip we went to the Bamboo Garden Museum. Which is a big park containing the largest number of different bamboo plants in China. The park was quite peculiar, in a typically chinese way, as it had a bird show (with singing parrots and a peacock throne) and other strange attractions such as zorbing and a rodeo bull. It even had a go-kart track which we thought about testing our skills on but then we saw how ridiculously slow the karts were going, however one chinese guy did manage to completely total one of the karts into the tyre wall and seemed to give himself an aneurysm. The best thing about the park was the lake and we took a bamboo boat around the lake for an hour or so. I've tried punting once before in Cambridge and was quite awful so this time stuck to the rowing part, xuan and I let Dan take part of the more tricky punting task. Our boat faired rather better than that of the girls who seemed to spend most of their time stuck on the side. After the boating was finished we looked at the panda exhibition and then made our way out for some dinner - bamboo all round!

Next we went to a river rapids. These were hardly the most dangerous river rapids I've ever been on but they were probably the most fun. It was basically just one massive water fight. I thought this might be the case when we got off the bus as they were selling water pistols and buckets but nothing could really prepare me for the onslaught that came. Every time we got near a chinese boat they would shout "GET THE FOREIGNERS" and lie in wait for us as we approached. I was sat on the front of the boat and got absolutely soaked every time. One boat gave up on rowing around the lake and just waited in the middle for other boats to attack! The whole thing lasted the best part of 90 minutes I think and by the end I was wetter than I have ever been before. We all got on the mini bus absolutely dripping from head to toe! Luckily our hotel was among the best I have stayed in in China (and only 70Yuan for 3 person room) so we could all shower and get changed in comfort. The food in the hotel was awesome and we discovered that apart from Bamboo Anji also grows a lot of potatoes! So that evening we feasted on fried new potatoes and pheasant casserole!

The next day we went to the forest where "crouching tiger, hidden dragon" was filmed and then went to a mountain / waterfall park (which again turned into a massive water fight between Xuan, Emma and myself). The views here were absolutely stunning and when we got to the top of the mountain it was amazing to see how the locals lived in such a rural environment. By the time we got back to the top it was already park closing time so we were "escorted" out by a friendly guard - meaning we had to take it at slightly quicker pace than we had possibly wanted; this did however mean that most of us were more than ready for a good sleep when we got back on the mini bus to come home.

Anji Pictures

one of the many beautiful waterfalls


workers at the top of the waterfall preparing bamboo to eat


Bamboo in the forest is marked so they know how old it is

boat lady on the river in the bamboo park

bridge across the river

Beijing - 北京

I was working up in Beijing a few weeks ago for a couple of days so had the chance to re-explore the city where I spent so much time when I lived in China previously. A lot has happened in China since March 2006 (when I flew out of Beijing airport to return home) most notably of course, the Olympics. When I was last here the government was shutting down mass number of factories and taking cars off the road in order to improve the air quality ahead of the olympics. As far as I'm concerned this must have been a terrific success as the 3 days that i was there I was greated by blue skies and bright sunshine - not one smog cloud - and the whole place was much, much cleaner than Shanghai (which is currently undergoing its own facelift in preparation for Expo 2010). I dropped into Tianamen Square but as it was the day before the 20th anniversary of the "incident" (don't want to get shut down - blogger is already banned in China) people were banned from walking there and the opportunities to take photos were extremely limited. I've seen TV reports that showed undercover police man blocking the shots of news reporters with umbrellas pretending to be tourists whislt carrying CS Spray and a pistol.

The rest of the time in Beijing was spent shopping and catching up with old friends. A good friend of mine, Lisa, is now studying at law school in Beijing so I said I'd call in on her for a catch up. In order to make sure the students study and don't go out too much they locate the college as far out of the centre as possible - it was right near the radiant mountain. It took me 1 hour on the metro and then an additional 20/30 minute cab ride to get there.

Once I arrived we jumped straight back into the cab, as there is absolutely nothing in the area at all. For lunch we went to a people's liberation army themed restuarant. The whole place was decked out with communist propaganda and the staff were dressed up as either army officers or farm hands, on the hour every hour they performed all the old traditonal Maoist songs. We were eating at 12noon and I was amazed at how full the resutaurant was. Everyone else there was over the age of 60 though! Each audience member was given a red flag to wave and most of the people joined in dancing and singing along - unfortunately photos were not allowed to be taken.

After eating with Lisa she had to go back to school for class so I caught the taxi into town to meet up with another old friend, Vivien. Vivien was a teacher at No.42 School when i was there and has now married and is living in Beijing. She is no longer working as a teacher but would like to return to it and also misses Shijizahuang a lot!

auf wiedersehen carsten - 经常联系啊！

One of the key players in our little group for the first three months was Carsten. A german who is qualified at the American Bar and had previously been in the navy, he had an insatiable appetite for sausages and beer and a huge amount of stories to keep us entertained. In Shanghai Carsten had been working for Freshfields as part of a 3 month internship before going back to Germany to take his German law exams. In order to celebrate his time with us and bid him all the best for the future we had a series of nights out to wish him all the best. The first came on the night of the Champions League Final - a night which will go down in History as Carsten's second final night i'm sure.



The second night we went for a rather nice meal at Ye Shanghai in Xintiandi with a few of Carsten's friends from New York. I must say that rather than being remembered for the quality of the food or the environment of the restaurant (both of which were superb I must add) the evening's most memorable feature will be some of the ridiculous comments that Carsten's female friend came out with. The best being *you get male pandas? so do pandas have a penis?* and (to jo's husband) *so you do things with science things right? we could have a lot in common - Jo replied "yes, you could, but you won't".

After the meal we went back to my house for a few bottles of champagne and other celebratory drinks inc. bijou and red bull, a little dancing a few drinking games before heading out to the warehouse party. As said before the party was pretty good fun and a lot better than we expected but the music was pretty "underground" so we didn't stay for any longer than a couple of hours. After we finished there we went on to Zapatas - a mexican themed place with a lovely garden where they encourage you to dance on the bar - for a few chilled drinks before hitting another club. All in all, it was a great night and a fitting way to say goodbye to the large german sausage.

Take care mate, hope to see you soon in Hamburg!

Warehouse....PARTY

As part of Carsten's going away celebrations we ended up at a Warehouse party in quite a rundown part of the city. The story of how we ended up there is quite protracted but might as well enlighten you as I have nothing better to do. I received a message from someone I know on Facebook telling me there was a "secret" warehouse party taking place and telling me to bring friends but not to tell many people as the chinese police had a habit of shutting these things down. The next day the same invite appeared on a blog i read but with the same warning and then on the day of the party it was posted on a major shanghai website advertising events. We thought we'd been duped by pretty clever guerilla marketing but as we turned up there were signs telling you to go straight in and not make too much noise and it was taking place in a warehouse so I guess it was pretty much as described. The music was good and the drinks were cheap so no complaints from me anyway!



Below is a photo from another blog showing the warehouse in daytime....

Champions League Final

Despite the fact that it kicked off at 3am in the morning i was never going to miss the chance of seeing Man Utd getting embarrased on the world's biggest stage so a few mates and I made our way to O'Malleys (a large Irish Pub) to watch the Champions League Final. You had to pay 100 Yuan (about £9) to get in but that included your first two pints and despite this there must have been 300/400 people there. The atmosphere was pretty amazing: being Asia the pub was mostly full of man united fans but there was also a good pocket full of Barcelona supporters who gave their all in trying to compete in chanting competitions.

Obviously we all know the result by now, but I was amazed by how ordainary Man Utd were made to look by players like Iniesta and Messi. People speak about the domination of English football but our champions (also this seasons champions) were swept aside effortlessly by the Spanish - I think Blackpool might have given them a better game! Anyhow it was a great night - by the time it finished it was 5am and we were high on euphoria and the 6/7 pints we'd drank so made our way to McDonalds for some breakfast and to watch the sun rise - laughing at the crying manchester united fans on the way....

The Blue Devils - 蓝魔

I posted a while back about going to see Shanghai Shenhua and how it wasn't possible to get tickets for the more exciting parts of the ground - when the more "fanatical supporters" sit - as those seats are exclusively for season ticket holders. I've found a way though. I bought my last tickets off a tout for a block about 2 around from the "Lan Mo" and then used all my stealth (nil) to climb over the barriers into the intersting section. Much, much better watching the game from there. Said to say when the football is so bad you do often end up watching the supporters rather than the crowd. Once again they did mexican waves which went around the whole stadium - i voiced my displeasure on the issue.

I'm going away with the "ultras" for the away game to Nanjing in August I think and hopefully to Hangzhou before then. Should be good fun. Will be interesting to see what it is like in China as an away fan.

Here is one of the songs that they like to sing at games (I'd best get learning all the words):

Lan Se Rong YaoWo men ba huan le bei shang gei niZuo ni zhong shi yong huWo men yong na hai feng kuang ge sui niZhan dou cong bu ting buOle! Shenhua! Ole Shenhua!Nong lie de xue zai liu tangBen xiang sheng li de fang xiangOle Shenhua! Ole Shenhua!Zhan dou hao jiao yi chui xiangTa ding qian jin de bu faOle Shenhua! Ole Shenhua!Lan se de xue zai liu tangBen xiang guan jun de fang xiangOle Shenhua! Ole Shenhua!Cheng shi de zui yan rong guangHan wei wo men de xin yang.

Blue Glory

We leave our happiness and sorrow with you,To become your loyal fans. We follow your steps with screams and cheers,Battles are going on. Ole Shenhua! Ole Shenhua! Blood is running. Towards the triumphOle Shenhua! Ole Shenhua!The call to arms is on. Moving forward steadily. Ole Shenhua! Ole Shenhua!Blue blood is runningTowards triumphOle Shenhua! Ole Shenhua!The dignity and glory of ShanghaiIs protecting our faith.